6. The undeniable arrival of the era of big data will lead to further proliferation in data management alternatives.

Actual statistical analysis (as opposed to mere OLAP-style aggregation) of large data sets is a priority for many organizations today, following the lead of the big Web players like Google and Facebook. Naturally, Hadoop gets a mention here.

7. Advanced Visualization will continue to increase in depth and relevance to broader audiences.

Business is moving beyond bar charts and (gasp!) pie charts to adopt more interactive and revealing ways of looking at data. Interactive visualization software like Tableau and Spotfire get mentions here, but I was particularly interested to see integrating data with maps (via Google Maps) listed as a trend.

8. Open Source offerings will continue to make in-roads against on-premise offerings.

According to Bardoliwalla, "Open Source offerings in the larger BI market are disrupting the incumbent, closed-source, on-premise vendors." Pentaho and Jaspersoft are the obvious players in BI, but it was great to see that R and REvolution Computing were also listed as open-source solutions for statistical analysis. Bardoliwalla continues: "These offerings have absolutely reached a level of maturity where they are capable of being deployed in the enterprise right alongside any other commercial closed-source vendor offering." With regard to REvolution R Enterprise, I think that’s true for advanced predictive analytics applications today (especially when integrated with a BI front-end like Pentaho); as its capabilities are developed further I expect we’ll see it deployed for more and more mainstream applications.